Ibrahima Konate signing proves Michael Edwards has changed Liverpool transfer strategy

It was not how they will have pictured securing their place, but Liverpool will once more play Champions League football next season.

For the fourth successive campaign under Jurgen Klopp, the Reds made sure that their place at the table of Europe's premier competition was secured.

A 2-0 win over Crystal Palace on the final day of the Premier League season was actually enough to see them sneak into third as a difficult eight months of action was washed away in the dying minutes.

Having won eight of a 10-game unbeaten run from March onwards, Klopp's players eventually leapfrogged Leicester and Chelsea, finishing behind only champions Manchester City and United as a result.

The season, on the whole, was far from ideal, but qualification to the European Cup gives supporters something tangible to show for it, at least.

Crucially a place in the Champions League also helps in the fight to once more dethrone Man City next time out.

From both a sporting and financial perspective, qualification to the Champions League affords Liverpool more firepower when it's time to go to war over transfers this summer.

Klopp has never made any secret of its importance where recruitment is concerned.

"In the season when we came second (2018-19), the day when I started really thinking about the title race was the day when it was clear that we are in the Champions League," he said back in January.

"I know my job and I know what I have to do. The most important thing is to qualify for the Champions League and I know how difficult it is."

In simple terms, the earlier Liverpool qualify for the Champions League the quicker Klopp and the club's recruitment team understand how much they have to work with in the window.

It allows them more time to effectively plan their next steps around just who they feel they can bring to the club in the market.

So a last-gasp sealing of a place at Europe's top table will have been far from ideal.

Liverpool, though, will simply consider it a success that they are in there at all after a tough campaign that was beset by injuries to key players.

That the Reds needed to pick up 26 points from the final 30 on offer to make sure tells you that there will be no lamenting being made to wait for their entry into August's draw.

Asked earlier this month by the ECHO if he'd had been made aware of what kind of budget was available to him this summer, the Liverpool boss said he did not anticipate too much movement across the market either way.

"Do I know what we have to work with? Yes, not a lot, anyway," Klopp said.

"We cannot speak for years and years about our structure or whatever, it is always how it is.

"It depends to the business, what happens, if someone wants to leave or if players want to go, if we sell, so we can never really plan early.

"But not playing in the Champions League doesn’t help, but it is not our biggest problem because the market will be really strange.

"I hear a lot about big-money moves, I don't know if Kylian Mbappe is going or not, whether Haaland or Sancho will, these kinds of players.

"I don’t see that happening this summer because the football world is still not in the same place it was before.

"Getting the injured players back makes us already better. These are our first transfers."

But while Klopp insists the pre-season returns of Joe Gomez, Virgil van Dijk and Joel Matip represent the "first transfers" of the window at Anfield, they are busy pressing on with actual deals too.

The interest in RB Leipzig's Ibrahima Konate is set to be stepped up imminently with Liverpool close to bringing the France Under-21 international to Anfield.

A buyout clause, believed to be around £36million, means Leipzig can do little to stand in Konate's way.

The 22-year-old is currently with the French side at the U21 Euros in Hungary and Liverpool hope to conclude a deal in the next 48 hours.

It represents not only a change in direction for Liverpool, whose last two defensive recruits were short-term and stop-gap signings in Ben Davies and Ozan Kabak, but also a shift of strategy.

Last summer, the ongoing implication of operating during a worldwide pandemic meant the club were made to wait until mid-September to sign Diogo Jota and Thiago Alcantara.

As Liverpool worked behind the scenes to juggle their finances, the Reds' defence of their title was already underway when Jota and Thiago joined across the weekend of September 18 and 19.

Again, that was a situation that will have been an imperfect one for Klopp, but it appears as though the situation has now changed.

This time, around, the pursuit of Konate is early and decisive.

And while the club are yet to conclude the deal in full, they remain confident that the defender will become their player.